WikiLeaks Reveals the 'Snowden Stopper': CIA Tool To Track Whistleblowers (zerohedge.com)

schwit1 quotes a report from Zero Hedge: As the latest installment of it's "Vault 7" series, WikiLeaks has just dropped a user manual describing a CIA project known as "Scribbles" (a.k.a. the "Snowden Stopper"), a piece of software purportedly designed to allow the embedding of "web beacon" tags into documents "likely to be stolen." The web beacon tags are apparently able to collect information about an end user of a document and relay that information back to the beacon's creator without being detected. Per WikiLeaks' press release. But, the "Scribbles" user guide notes there is just one small problem with the program: it only works with Microsoft Office products. So, if end users use other programs such as OpenOffice of LibreOffice then the CIA's watermarks become visible to the end user and their cover is blown.

Comments

Re:ha?

[vtcodger]

"Why would the beacons be limited to MS-products reading MS Office documents?"

I'd assume the beacons use some sort of macro that's unique to MS products or that works differently in their free software equivalents -- like maybe asking permission before phoning home.

That's the trouble with being a spook. All those persnickety details one has to worry about.

Re:MS's role?

[Gravis Zero]

Is it MS' software that was reading these tags and relaying them to some other process that phones it home to the CIA? Or does MS' software do that directly?

It's much less nefarious than that but it's criminally stupid on Microsoft's part.

The article seems to indicate that word documents have the ability to grab online resources that are referenced within documents. I suspect the tool merely embeds a reference to a transparent image that must be grabbed from a CIA controlled server. Effectively, word documents are more like html documents that can embed resources or load them from an URI.